With the advent and huge popularity of image scanners, video capture cards and digital still and video cameras, it is common for people to store a large number of photographs and other documents on personal computers and other computer related devices. There is a need for users of these devices to be able to access and navigate through their documents to view items and to visually search for items.
Modern computing systems often provide a variety of methods for viewing large collections of documents which can be controlled computer interface control devices including a mouse and pointer, and also by keyboard input, or other physical controls such as scroll wheels, as found on some mouse devices. The methods generally provide a means to select a location within a storage structure and return the set of items within that location or to return a set of items matching a certain query. A viewing area is then used to display representations of items from the set, typically in a sequence. For large sets it is common that only a limited number of the items in the set be viewed in the viewing area at any one time. The user can use the mouse and pointer or other input control device to execute commands which move items through the viewing area so that items earlier or later in the sequence are displayed. The action of visually moving items through or past a display area is herein referred to as “scrolling”. The action of controlling scrolling for the purpose of exploring a set is herein referred to as “browsing”. These terms are widely known in the art according to these general definitions.
Some systems for browsing and viewing images and other digital media collections have an interface which provides a relatively small thumbnail presentation of each item, together with some means to select individual items to afford a larger preview of the selected item. These systems require the user to focus on two different areas—one for selection and one for preview.
Another interface approach for selecting and previewing is to distort the proportions of the selected item so that the selected item is shown much larger, and the adjacent items in the collection are either occluded or compressed. All items of the collection remain represented in the same arrangement, but the selection affects the relative size on the display of the selected item, and sometimes those items which are close to the selected item. These interfaces may also include scrolling function permitting the user the ability to traverse or search the collection.
Accordingly, systems for scrolling through sets of items can demand different configurations for different situations. ISO9241 defines the usability of a system as comprising the efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction which a user experiences when interacting with the system. The prior art described demonstrates that efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction for a scrolling interface can be affected by the configuration chosen related to the device used.